The Process of Innovation Assimilation by Firms in Different Countries: A Technology Diffusion Perspective on E-Business

By Kevin Zhu, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Sean Xin Xu. Management Sciences, 2006

1,439 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper extends our previous studies on the assimilation of Internet-based e-business innovations by firms in an international setting. Drawing upon theories on the process and contexts of technology diffusion, we develop an integrative model to examine three assimilation stages: initiation → adoption → routinization. The model features technological, organizational, and environmental contexts as prominent antecedents of this three-stage assimilation process. Based on this model, we hypothesize how technology readiness, technology integration, firm size, global scope, managerial obstacles, competition intensity, and regulatory environment influence e-business assimilation at the firm level. A unique data set of 1,857 firms from 10 countries is used to test the conceptual model and hypotheses. To probe deeper into the influence of the environmental context, we compare two subsamples from developed and developing countries. Our empirical analysis leads to several key findings: (1) Competition positively affects initiation and adoption, but negatively impacts routinization, suggesting that too much competition is not necessarily good for technology assimilation because it drives firms to chase the latest technologies without learning how to use existing ones effectively. (2) Large firms tend to enjoy resource advantages at the initiation stage, but have to overcome structural inertia in later stages. (3) We also find that economic environments shape innovation assimilation: Regulatory environment plays a more important role in developing countries than in developed countries. Moreover, while technology readiness is the strongest factor facilitating assimilation in developing countries, technology integration turns out to be the strongest in developed countries, implying that as e-business evolves, the key determinant of its assimilation shifts from accumulation to integration of technologies. Together, these findings offer insights into how innovation assimilation is influenced by contextual factors, and how the effects may vary across different stages and in different environments.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5d34b363362e1e762d74d456900780611e0ec12

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In Management Science and Operations Research

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Citations in the corpus

Firms patterns of e-business adoption: evidence for the European Union-27. (2009, methodology): “Correspondingly, a greater integration of existing applications and the internet platform represent a greater capacity of conducting business over the internet (Al-Qirim 2007, Mirchandani and Motwani 2001, Premkumar 2003, Zhu et al. 2006).”
Augmented reality in support of Industry 4.0 - Implementation challenges and success factors (2019, background): “In addition, the resources available [90] – often related to the size of a company [91] –and the supportiveness of the company culture towards the new technology have been shown to influence the success of technology implementation [92].”
Literature Review of Information Technology Adoption Models at Firm Level (2011, methodology): “…Martins 2009); enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Pan and Jang 2008); business to business (B2B) e-commerce (Teo et al. 2006); e-business (Zhu et al. 2003, Zhu and Kraemer 2005, Zhu et al. 2006b, Lin and Lin 2008, Oliveira and Martins 2010a); knowledge management systems (KMS) (Lee et al. 2009).”
Understanding the impact of social media usage among organizations (2017, methodology): “The framework was also used to explain e-business adoption [12,13] and use [14,13,15].”
Internet/e-business technologies acceptance in Canada's SMEs: An exploratory investigation (2011, background): “Against the backdrop of the popularity of IEBT, it is not surprising that several researchers have investigated and continue to study the adoption or acceptance of such technologies in differing contexts and locations (Farhoomand et al., 2000; Sadowski et al., 2002; Zhu et al., 2006; Wymer & Regan, ”
How the Use of Big Data Analytics Affects Value Creation in Supply Chain Management (2015, neutral): “Although the effects of competitive pressures on organizational IT adoption have been reported in extant studies [11, 76, 89, 90], with the exception of Liang et al.”
Integrative framework for assessing firms' potential to undertake Green IT initiatives via virtualization - A theoretical perspective (2011, methodology): “Other validated instrument items rooted in the ToE theory can be derived from prior relevant studies such as Zhu and Kraemer (2005) and Zhu et al. (2006).”
On the relationship between supplier integration and time-to-market (2013, background): “This is followed by an adoption stage, where firms decide whether to acquire the technology, as well as a routinization stage, in which the acquired technology is embedded in the organization by overcoming learning barriers (Zhu et al., 2006).”
Research Note - Information Technology in Supply Chains: The Value of IT-Enabled Resources Under Competition (2009, background): “Firms such as Cisco, General Electric, Wal-Mart, and Dell are using IT to coordinate processes along their supply chains, including upstream procurement, internal production, and downstream sales and customer services, as well as overall information sharing along the supply chain (Lee 2002).”
SMEs' adoption of enterprise applications: A technology-organisation-environment model (2013, background): “In the environmental context, competitive pressure (Zhu et al., 2006) has been confirmed to be significant.”
Digital innovation: A review and synthesis (2019, background): “Beyond adoption, different factors may advance or hinder assimilation (Fichman & Kemerer, 1997) depending on the phase (initiation, adoption, routinization; Rai, Brown, & Tang, 2009; Zhu, Kraemer, & Xu, 2006).”